


Ricochet

by GRAYXOF



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: (Almost), Africa by Toto, Canon Compliant, Explicit Language, F/M, MGSV:TPP - Major Spoilers, MOLOTOK-68, Parasites, Sexual Tension, cavalier interpretation of the / tag, implied bbkaz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-05
Updated: 2016-10-31
Packaged: 2018-08-13 04:43:57
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 15,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7962934
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GRAYXOF/pseuds/GRAYXOF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>"She hasn't killed you yet... and I hate to say it, but she's had plenty of chances."</i>
  <br/>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. AWAKENING

NGUMBA INDUSTRIAL ZONE

Angola-Zaire Border Region

May 1984

 

12:58

 

 

_– seek to cure what’s deep inside_

_frightened of thi- —— that I’ve become_

 

_It’s gonna take - — - — — —- -e away from you_

_There’s nothing that a hu—— -en or more could ever —_

_I —ss - the rains down i- ——a_

_—- —ke -s— time to do the things we never had_

 

_——- —, she’s waiting–_

 

It’s not the track she would’ve chosen to wake up to. She keeps her eyes shut, furrows her brow against the radio static that’s boring into her skull like a power drill. They never did get good reception in the XOF transport chopper, but _damn_ if this wasn’t another circle of aural _hell_ –

She’s not in the chopper. What first clues her in to this is the distinct lack of harness digging into her shoulders. Then: apart from the radio… she can’t hear anything. No engines, no rotors, none of the bullshit ribbing from thestrike force guys. The air is choked with humidity, stiflingly hot, smells like antiseptic and dust. Oh, and she’s fucking _naked._ Great. She steels herself for the inevitable small talk she’s going to have to make in T-minus two minutes with whoever’s sharing this bitch of a hangover. Vaguely prays he’s attractive.

She opens her eyes.

 _Cyprus_ comes crashing in with the African sun. She remembers laughing over the codec as her unit infiltrated the hospital– “ _Remember, you’re my backup– so take the night off. On me.”_ Always joking, always dead serious. She’d been annoyed, a little indignant, when Skull Face had told her it wouldn’t be a solo mission. It wasn’t in her to question her commanding officer, but privately she’d wondered why deploy a small army to take a _civilian hospital_ when she could just as easily have eliminated her target alone, with a hand behind her back to boot.

It should have been that simple. One man, an _invalid,_ just out of a _nine-year coma–_ legendary soldier or not, Big Boss had been as vulnerable as he was ever going to be. And, hm, she’d fucked it up. Hadn’t scoped the ward properly, spent too long on the doctor, went for the man with no left hand and shrapnel in his skull. 

_“Consider it done.”_

Yeah, right. She’d left herself wide open, direly underestimated an invalid and a cripple, gave _him_ the chance to s _et her on fi–_

_Fuck._

Absolute terror blooms as the implications of her stunning incompetence hit her one by one. She’s lost her rank, her reputation, her pride, maybe her _leg– her skin–_

She doesn’t feel any pain. This is enough to calm her, gives her the clarity she needs to assess the situation. Whatever cocktail of horse tranquilizers they’ve got her on, it’s working, at least. That, or she's really lost everything, maybe broke her neck in the fall, snapped her spinal cord so bad even phantom pain is out of the question. She stares hard at the ceiling, which is filthy, but otherwise unremarkable, and considers her future as a burn victim, or a quadriplegic, or both. Inhales deeply through her nose.

She can’t.

Panic resurges in waves as she opens her mouth– can’t, again, because there’s a nylon  _muzzle_ fastened over her face with a bit shoved between her teeth. When she goes to rip it off she finds her wrists strapped down by her sides– and then, abruptly,  _not._ She bolts upright, fingers twisting at the buckles near her jaw, slick with sweat, shaking far too much to be any use.

“I’d keep it on, if I were you.”

The commander of XOF is sitting in a shitty plastic lawn chair across the room, in khakis and a white linen dress shirt, cracking open a can of beer with practiced grace. Like this is their vacation, and she’s just woken up in the penthouse suite, though his ugly museum piece of a shotgun is belted over his hip and his shirt is flecked with sweat, blood, other bodily fluids she doesn't care to examine too closely. 

She is at once cowed, furious, and mortified– not by her nakedness, but by her failure. Swings her legs off the cot, ready to stand at attention. Forgets to, because when she looks down–

Rather than a scramble of raw bloody muscle and blackened flesh, her skin is white, whole, almost translucent, streaked with a film of grayish residue that is definitely _not_ sweat. Aside from a few electrodes stuck to her ribs, an IV in her arm, and the disgusting mask, Cyprus may never have happened.

Skull Face raises a hand before she can ask the obvious questions. “Do not speak,” he says, scarred lips tight around his teeth. “Do not stand.”

He sums up the state of affairs with his customary bombast. The operation at the hospital had escalated into a disaster just shy of an _international incident_. Her unit had been annihilated– turns out they weren’t the only ones after Big Boss– and, ultimately, her target had walked right out the front door.

Later, they’d found her below the window of his ward, beaten into a mosaic of broken glass.

“In addition to the burns, you suffered trauma to the majority of your internal organs and fractured two vertebrae, most of your ribs, your knee… the fabric of your uniform sealed to what was left of your epidermis. I regret to say we had to take drastic measures to repair the damage.” Skull Face gestures grandly to an array of x-rays and photographs pinned to the wall. She forces herself to look, shivering in the thick heat of the afternoon. There it all is, spelled out plain as the day: the clinical details of her death.

 _“_ You were my right hand,” Skull Face says, thoughtfully. “An… _extraordinary_ agent on track to a _killer_ career.” He sighs. “But you had to go and get _cocky_.”

She grits her teeth behind the muzzle. He’s not wrong.

“You’ve been comatose for two months. In that time, you have been subject to an intensive physiological rebuild.” He places his beer on the floor by the leg of the chair and stands, takes a moment to straighten his shirt. “Breathe in.”

She can’t. It’s not because of the muzzle, or the panic in her chest, or the humidity. She works her mouth desperately against the bit, gasping, hoarse, but there’s a disconnect deep inside her and her ribcage rises and falls but her _lungs_ – her lungs aren’t working.

She’s really fucking _dead_.

She staggers to her feet, trips in shock because the brittle linoleum is hot beneath them and because she can _taste_ it– the grime, the rancid flavor of plastic, bleach. She can’t breathe, but she feels awfully strong. Hyperaware. She can see every mote of dust glinting in the sun between her and her commander. Catches him scanning her up and down.

_Son of a bitch._

“It was impossible to salvage your skin, lungs, and digestive system. To compensate, every cell in your body has been… augmented, for all intents and purposes, with a symbiotic colony of organisms that will oxygenate your blood, absorb water, and photosynthesize nutrients for you. You no longer need to eat or drink– or, by extension, eliminate waste. Your bones now exhibit six times the tensile strength of steel and you will recover from almost any injury– no matter how severe– in a matter of hours.”

She’s motherfucking dead. None of what he’s saying is medically possible. Not that she knows jack apart from the mandatory XOF first aid and survival training, but there’s just _no way–_

Except: Skull Face is still talking, and that’s what gives her the nasty feeling that this is the real world and not some kind of drug-induced hallucination or incredibly specific, fucked up purgatory. It’s too true to life. The bastard always did love the sound of his own voice.

“…disadvantages, of course. Because you respirate through your ‘skin,’ you will not be able to wear clothing or immerse yourself in water without risking suffocation.”

Okay, yeah, no, this is happening. She balls her hand into a fist, weighs the pros and cons of smashing it into the ruined hollow of his nasal cavity. If what he said about her bones is true, she’d probably kill him in one shot.

He smiles thinly at this. “You have every right to be angry,” he says. “I, above anyone else, can understand... remember that, and remember this: it was not I who did this to you. Big Boss is the man who burned your past to the ground. I am merely… giving it back.” Skull Face steps around her, kneels to fill a paper cup from the water cooler next to her cot. Gets right up in her face and pours it, with infuriating audacity, over her breasts.

It feels _so good._ A full-body shudder ripples through her, leaves her– well, she was already breathless, ha ha, but now she’s _winded._ Her new skin blazes like live wire _,_ craving the lukewarm water as much as she’d ever wanted sex. It’s insane. 

“Are you ready to make him pay, for what he’s taken from you?”

She just glares at him, distracted beyond belief. She wants more water. She wants to stand in a hurricane, or in the freezing showers back at the XOF headquarters and scream and _scream_ and– she wants to step over the Duque de  Bragança Falls and let the torrent pound her into the rocks until there's nothing left, wants to make sure that next time,  _next time_ there won't be any coming _back_ –

“Big Boss is alive and well in Afghanistan.” Skull Face closes a gloved hand around her jaw, tilts her head up to look at him. “You were my right hand, and now you are my gun. Do you promise to be quiet?”

He unfastens the muzzle as he tells her that her voice is now a weapon more lethal than any she’s handled, more powerful than a nuke, or a nation, or a legend. Shows her the tiny spark of neon in a test tube from his pocket– kin to what’s nesting in her throat– and promises that words will be what kills her.

“…but only as a last resort. I’d hate to expend a valuable asset so soon. You’re capable with a rifle, and, as they say… _actions_ speak louder than words.” Skull Face slides his fingers down her neck like a vice.“This time, keep your distance.”

 

-

 

OBTAINED TAPE: [AFRICA]

 

-


	2. VENOM

AABE SHIFAP RUINS

Northern Kabul, Afghanistan

June 1984

 

06:19

 

 

He’s not the man who killed her.

She watches him through the scope of her customized Renov-ICKX, lines up the shot on instinct when he walks under the archway at the south entrance to the ruins. Big man, armed to the teeth, all in black, all alone. He looks dangerously out of place in the rose-gold light of the dawn, like a nocturnal animal too crazed and sick to hide from the sun. Rabid.

She hums. She’s humming to herself a lot, these days, finds it steadies her hand in the same way breathing exercises used to. Back when she had her goddamn _lungs._ The lyrics echoing in her head keep her company, keep her tied to civilization. She’s stolen a few cassettes from the 40th Army’s ragtag outposts in the month she’s been in Afghanistan, played them over and over while she tracked her quarry via Soviet gossip and radio chatter.

 

_Why don’t you ask him what’s going on?_

_Why don’t you ask him who’s the latest on his throne?_

 

Big Boss, she’d quickly discovered, was as elusive as he was legendary. She knew the bare bones of his history– who didn’t? World’s greatest stealth agent turned mercenary martyr, every XOF rookie had idolized as much as feared him. Even Skull Face couldn’t diffuse the man’s impossible charisma. She’d landed in Kabul expecting reports of wanton slaughter, a blazing trail of blood-soaked sand, ash, and bullshit that she’d follow right to him.

If only she were so lucky. Big Boss’ signatures are more _subtle_ : a shot from a silenced pistol, a shadow on the sand, bodies found folded into dumpsters and portable toilets (or not at all). It reminds her of the health and safety briefing from her first week at the XOF HQ in Angola, back in ’79. She and the other recruits fresh off the chopper from Johannesburg had been corralled into a tent, given two dozen vaccines and stiff new radio collars, and left to sweat as a put-upon medic ran a slideshow of the local flora and fauna. One image stands out with particular clarity in her memory: a snake coiled in dead leaves on a forest floor, thick and ponderous, with a heavy triangular head and diamonds down its back.

“–the Gaboon viper, also known as a swampjack or butterfly adder, has the longest fangs and highest venom yield of anything you’ll run into out in the bush. A bite is a serious medical emergency and should be treated ASAP with antitoxin. Fortunately for _you_ , venomous snakes are invariably shy.”

 

_Don’t say that you want me!_

_Just tell me that you love me!_

 

Big Boss turns his head to her– whether the cocksucking son of a bitch noticed the reflection of her scope, has anexceptional sixth sense for danger, or if it’s just sheer chance, it doesn’t matter. What matters is: she sees, too late, the shrapnel jutting from his brow like a horn.

He’s not the man who killed her, but her finger is already on the trigger.

She takes the shot.

 

-

 

07:02

 

 

It’s less of a total shitshow than Cyprus, and somehow that makes it worse when she comes to and Big Boss is standing over her, holding a pistol to her head. Right– she’d missed, nailed him in the _fucking_ shoulder _._ Zeroed in her focus on getting another shot, lost track of her surroundings, _again,_ and–

 _And what?_ She doesn’t remember what hit her, but she feels extremely concussed. It’s all she can do to stare hazily down the barrel of Big Boss’ gun and wonder if getting shot point-blank in the face hurts, if that’s the kind of damage the parasites can bring her back from.

Big Boss drops to his haunches. This close, she can hear the crackle of voices on the other side of his comm.

“ _–you_ have _to kill her–“_

“ _Boss–_ ”

“ _Boss!_ ”

He sighs, opens his mouth, shuts it without saying anything. _Shit._ If he’s not going to kill her now– _he’s not the one who killed her in Cyprus, so who_ was _it– who is–_

She yanks her AM-Delta from her leg holster, works desperately to fit it under her jaw _because he’ll make her talk, and that will be the end of it, and she won’t die for fucking_ nothing _, not again_ , but Big Boss twists the weapon out of her hands before she can even get the safety off. She snarls, snaps her teeth at him as he holds her hands up against her chest with the broad metal palm of his prosthetic, straddles her to keep her still. They scuffle, briefly, ineffectively, before he manages to get a pair of handcuffs locked over her wrists.

She glowers up at him. If she were running at full capacity he’d be in pieces by now, bloody pulp, carrion for crows. Hell, she would’ve ripped him apart with her bare hands, but even the parasites can’t seem to fix what she suspects is a legitimate skull fracture– not this fast, anyway. Besides, he’s _heavy,_ with his full weight on her thighs like this.

Big Boss reaches to his neck and dials off his radio. Now that he’s neutralized the threat– _her–_ his movements are carefully considered, deliberate, almost _gentle._ The contrast is dizzying. 

“XOF,” is the first thing he says. He’s looking at her curiously, analyzing her in a way that’s completely different from how the guards at the safe house in Lufwa Valley had leered at her when she’d walked through the door, in a combat vest and her underwear and nothing else. There’s no heat, no arousal in his expression, only honest puzzlement. Fair enough. She’d just tried to blow his head off and her current attire is a far cry from standard fatigues. She had been given the option to wait another fortnight at Lufwa– Skull Face’s research team was looking into a suit compatible with her bizarre fucked up physiology, apparently– but she’d declined. No point in risking suffocation for the sake of something so human as _modesty._

“You were at the hospital,” Big Boss’ voice is like gravel in his throat.  “At Cyprus–“

Maybe _,_ she thinks dully, he’s going to strangle her. _Eye for an eye, and all that._

“What happened?”

The question is so simple, so _sincere,_ she nearly answers him. Words rise in her like bile and she has to swallow hard to keep them down. Swallows again, and then chokes, cranes her neck to throw up tar-black acid over the flagstones. Her head _really_ fucking hurts. So does her knee.

“Hm,” Big Boss watches her blankly. “You don’t talk.”

She spits out a final mouthful of vomit in reply. It occurs to her that she _doesn’t_ know what happened back at the Dhekelia SBA Memorial Hospital, and it chills her to the fucking bone. At Ngumba, Skull Face had said Big Boss was the one who’d burned her alive, but what did he know? _Statistically, everything._ She’d been given _one target_ , all intel had pointed to one patient in– _V has come to._ _Not a legend: a soldier, a man barely out of a nine-year coma, one Boss and one–_

“ _Snake!”_

Big Boss has switched his radio back on. _“_ Give Pequod the OK. We’re moving out.”

Tinny static erupts through the speaker in his ear. “ _Boss, you know I always have your back– but if she sets one foot on this base, I’ll just have her killed. Don’t bring her to our home!_ ”

“ _Relax, Miller–“_

_“Shut the fuck up.”_

He ignores them both and, very slowly, lets go of her hands, rolls back on his heels so that she can sit up. The rush of blood to her head almost makes her sick a second time but she rides it out, blinking sunspots from her eyes, bracing herself for a blow that isn’t coming.

Big Boss leaves her to pop her dislocated knee back into place, his one good eye flicking up at regular intervals to make sure she’s not going anywhere. Clamps an e-cigar (really?) between his teeth and gets busy cleaning his gun. She steals glances at him when he’s not looking, stubbornly avoiding eye contact, determined to study his face. It’s… it’s _so_ close to the grainy photograph that came paperclipped to her briefing files, enough so that the differences can almost be explained away by the quality (shit) and age (ten years) of the image, by the explosion and the coma. But–

But there’s something intangibly _off_ , something about the way his mouth softens the scars that split his face like longitude lines on a map, the way it pulls into a phantom of a smile when, _fuck_ , he’s caught her staring–

 _Oh_.

Oh, for the love of– _there it is_ , she can see it now: the coordinates don’t line up. The map of his features leads to a place that doesn’t exist.

Nausea hits again, not because of her injuries this time. The revulsion coiling in the remnant of her gut is the same she’d felt at her first look in a mirror back at the safe house. Self-loathing wasn’t an emotion she’d been accustomed to, never had time for it, never saw the _point._ You don’t get far as a black ops assassin if there’s room in your heart for doubt or pity, and, well, she’d been gunning to be the best in the business. What kind of fucking crazy monkey’s paw wish fulfillment was this, then? 

_You are my gun._

She’d put her fist through the mirror. It had been an antique, heavy, flaking gilt over the greasy zebra rug, cut up the false skin stretched over her new bones.  Her flesh had taken half an hour to knit back together and she'd watched, trying to parse the storm of conflicting impulses roiling around her head. She’d sold her soul to XOF from day one, had always figured she’d bite it out in the field. Swearing her loyalty to her commanding officer and to her mission was first nature, easy as breathing, so what did it matter if she didn’t need to breathe anymore _? Was she so arrogant, so prideful that being stripped down to her base components was fatal to her psyche? She’d been halfway to hell long before she died. That’s what happens, when you pick up a gun and let somebody else pull the trigger._

She's not even a fucking unique case. The XOF strike force is riddled with freaks, savants, failed experiments, rejects from the CIA's covert Perfect Soldierproject, rescues from OKBs all over the Soviet Union. You name it, Skull Face has probably headhunted it for his shitty private army. And then there's–

The man wearing Big Boss’ face is still staring her down, eye as silver as the ocean at dawn, blood in his lashes and his beard from when her bullet struck his shoulder. Patient and unfathomable. It’s like her reflection in the mirror all over again, and she can’t deal with it, grapples for another point of focus.

The weapon slung over his massive shoulders is a sniper rifle.He follows her gaze, nods once in acknowledgement. “M-2000. This one takes tranq rounds.”

_A tranquilizer rifle?_

Suddenly the unsettling lack of bodies– and survivors– makes perfect sense. She wonders if he _knows,_ if he’s been drafted to carry on the name of a killer and doesn’t have the balls to live up to it. Or maybe he’s a brainwashed puppet and taking prisoners is just what Big Boss _does_. She’s heard the Soviets mention a hidden base, a new army– has he actually been sniping soldiers and press-ganging them into service, one at a time?

Is that… what’s happening to _her_?

There’s a certain level of pragmatism in the idea that she can appreciate, so she huffs at him. For whatever reason, he takes this as an opening.

“Your Renov– that’s a classic, used in the field since the second World War. Good accuracy. If you like the bolt-action, though, you’re better off with a Brennan. You’ll get more bang for your buck to make up for the slow rate of fire.”

She has to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, first at him, then at herself, because the motherfucker’s _right_. If she’d shot him with a Brennan, their positions might be reversed right now, but she isn’t carrying a _Brennan_ because a Brennan is an even twenty-two pounds heavier than a Renov. Fine for an op where you roll in, roll out, but hellish to travel with. The only thought stopping her from kicking that obnoxious horn the rest of the way into his skull is that _the mission isn’t over_ – if he’s going to drag her back to his base _,_ there’s a definite chance that the… that the _other_ Big Boss–

Honestly? She _really fucking hates_ that stupid code name. He’s not her boss, never will be.

She cracks her neck, keeps watching him out of the corner of her eye. He’s gone as quiet as she is, evidently satisfied to share her silence now that he’s told her what he thinks of her gun. She’s probably lost her mind, she decides, or hit her head harder than she thought because it feels– not exactly _comfortable_ , not really _nice,_ but her hackles are going down, just listening to him breathe. The wind changes, shrouds him in his own cigar smoke. Blurs him out.

_V has come to._

She’ll never say it out loud, but she gives him a name.

 

-

 

OBTAINED TAPE: [TUSK]

  

-


	3. QUIET

MOTHER BASE, MEDICAL PLATFORM 1

Seychelles Waters

June 1984

 

21:46

 

 

Intel team lead and tactical instructor Revolver “Shalashaska” Ocelot gives her an absurd code name of her own, her first night on Mother Base.

“Sniper Quiet.”

Ocelot is more _construct_ than man, so blatantly false that it actually feels genuine, like there's nothing behind his facade at all and he knows it. She’s heard of him before, in passing, over tequila shots at the XOF New Year’s party in 1981: Shalashaska, interrogation specialist, sadist, quadruple agent at the very least. Maybe the son of a dead and forgotten war hero, maybe not. _War hero_ is, after all, a fucking oxymoron.

An oxymoron like the Russian spy with a flagrantly affected Texan accent and a well-worn copy of _The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing_ in his pocket. He’s pacing around her cell as he talks, spurs clinking with every step, a regular paradigm of feline grace. “From what the Red Army calls you. _Tixij._ My guess is, they never got close enough to see you’re a woman.”

The cell is set deep in the deck of the Medical Platform, a steel cage open to the elements, devoid of privacy, under all kinds of surveillance. It’s a pretty comfortable living situation they've thrown her in, really– unlimited access to sunlight and rain, a barrier between her and the rest of the base. She’s certain it’s unintentional. If anyone here knew the nature of her abilities, she’d be locked away in a windowless pit and left to suffocate or starve. Whichever came first.

 _“_ Very impressive, taking out that jet the way you did,” Ocelot says. He’s tried speaking to her in seven different languages and called in interpreters for another seven. Having gotten nowhere, he’s reverted to his favorite American drawl. He saunters up to the bars, hesitates almost imperceptibly before wrapping a hand around one of them. Cautious, but too brazenly curious to be afraid of her.

“You’re a crack shot with that rifle.” He trails his fingers over the bars. “To hit a moving target from that distance, at that speed… from a Blackfoot…” Ocelot shakes his head theatrically, shrugs one shoulder for flourish. He’s either genuinely impressed, or trying to throw her off balance. She eyes him from where she’s lying back on her bunk, ostensibly stargazing, with the uniform jacket they’d given her folded under her head for a pillow. She's never been prone to flattery but,  _fuck,_ she feels like her brain's already been put through a meat grinder, because–

“Interestin’ you saved Snake after you went to kill him,” Ocelot pulls up a folding chair, finally sits down. Leans on in like she’s actually telling him what he wants to hear. In a way, she supposes that’s exactly what she’s doing. Her silence, her ongoing cooperation, the fact that V is still _alive_ – well, that says it all, really. If she'd only been looking out for herself, she could've just–

“Saved our best pilot, too. Thank you for that.”

Interesting that he uses the old code name rather than _his_ title, talking to a POW. He’s not trying to sell her on the Big Boss pitch, hasn’t mentioned it once since he locked the door of the cell behind her. It strikes her as somewhat counterintuitive. Then again, he hasn’t strapped her to a water board yet, either, and she still has all her fingernails. _He_ _knows what he’s doing._

In fact, it's fair to assume the sleazy prick knows what's going on in her head better than she does. Fucking arrogant Psych 101 piss-drinking  _fuck._ She grits her teeth, almost growlsat him. 

"Commander Miller thinks you're with CIPHER, but that's... well, that's not actually as much of a problem as he wants to believe. There are men and women here from the 40th Army, Mujahideen forces, African-based PFs... and plenty of volunteers, from all over. As Snake would say: sometimes the battlefield ain't just about enemies and allies. Still, if you want to stay here, I'm going to need answers. "

 _Fuck_ him.

Every XOF recruit went through interrogation and resistance training courtesy of the US Army in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. She’d referred to it once as “a CIA circlejerk” on a smoke break and gotten a shitstorm of a dressing-down for her trouble– but that’s what it _was,_ really. KUBARK Manual 101. Absolute hell, not anything she’d care to repeat, but nowhere near as bad as being _burned alive,_ not that she’d known it then. What she’s afraid of now isn’t pain or psychological trauma or humiliation– it’s that Ocelot will stick her with a shot of sodium thiopental and bring on armageddon because she won’t be able to keep her goddamn mouth shut.

“...but not right now. I won’t keep you up all night,” he says, and the sheer civility of the statement almost earns him a look from her. “I’d like to run some medical tests tomorrow, and I would be obliged if you were to cooperate. Bright and early.”

Ocelot scrapes his chair back across the cement, nods curtly at the two guards hanging back behind him. They snap to attention, Diamond Dogs with tails between their legs. Scared shitless of her. If Ocelot notices or cares, he gives no indication–he takes his time checking the lock on her cell, circles around once more for good measure. He gets halfway to the stairs up to the deck before he stops abruptly, turns on his heel and slips between the guards.

“Sir–“

Ocelot waves him silent and strides back to the surveillance room, vanishes behind the one-way glass, reemerges a few seconds later with a cassette player under one arm. She watches from the corner of her eye as he sets it down gingerly and presses play. The tape is hers– she picked it up at Guard Post 01. She recognizes the crystalline notes of a synthesizer instantly. Ocelot leaves without another word as the vocals cut in, loud enough to drown out anything he might’ve said:

 

_Here comes the rain again_

_Falling on my head like a memory_

_Falling on my head like a new emotion_

_I want to walk in the open wind_

_I want to talk like lovers do_

_I want to dive into your ocean_

_Is it raining with you?_

 

_So baby, talk to me–_

 

-

 

MOTHER BASE, MEDICAL PLATFORM 1

Seychelles Waters

July 1984

 

14:25

 

 

“Quiet.”

She’s been working without mission support since her deployment in Afghanistan. No radio contact to trip her into breaking her silence, no trail for Ocelot to follow back to Skull Face or Angola. No one to call her by her XOF designation, to say nothing of her given name– she hasn’t heard _that_ since 1979. To be Quiet is strange, a raw, infected part of her more alien than her skin. She’s not exactly comfortable with how quickly she’s grown accustomed to hearing it, how she responds automatically if she’s not careful, the way she leans into the pull on her new leash. Parasites or no parasites, she’s still a soldier.

So Quiet never _really_ rises to the slurs the men on security detail spit through the bars of her cell, and she lets the medical team run their tests, and she doesn’t take it personally when Ocelot has her escorted to Room 101 and goes to work on her. After all, she _is_ a monster, an enemy agent, not to be trusted– and on top of it, stubborn, flinty, incredibly resilient. She half-expects Ocelot to take advantage of this, to subject her to whatever sick fantasies someone known as Shalashaska might have, but he seems to know more about  _everything_ than she does, less interested in answers than he is in showing off. Like it doesn't matter if she talks. Initially, she thinks his restraint comes from being a womanizer. Her second guess is that he’s a double agent for XOF. Both theories get shot full of holes when she sees the way he looks at his Boss.

– who’s lingering just beyond the stanchions set up around her cell, fingers jammed under his utility belt, a long black case at his feet.

“You still want in?”

No, Ocelot’s angle is this: he sees her as a tactical asset, another weapon in Big Boss' arsenal. Just like everyone else.

“It’s a pretty standard op,” V says. He’s raised his voice to be heard over the heavy rhythm of Kim Wilde bleeding from the stereo, and it doesn’t suit him, claws at his throat on the way out. Makes him go nasal, in a regal sort of way. “Direct from the MPLA. We’re eliminating a stock ofbipedal weapons deployed to a PF outpost in West Africa.”

She twists off her shower, shakes bitter recycled water from her hair and ties it back up into a ponytail. She’s taken to keeping her scant clothes on even for this, because it gives the guards something to bitch about. At least one has been driven to drink waiting for her to take a shit, and that? That’s almost worth not being able to digest solid food. She never thought she’d miss ration kits.

V looks away as she rubs the last of the water into her skin. He seems out of place indoors, takes up more space than any one man– and certainly not _half a man–_ ever should. He’s scanning the room as she laces up her boots, mapping all possible exits even though it's his own damn base and he’s been down here often enough, now. His first visit, he’d come with Ocelot, who had talked enough for the three of them. The interrogator had taken it upon himself to brief his Boss on her...  _unique_ physiology, broke down the Medical team's reports into convenient half-truths. V followed him easily enough. Quiet suspects he's seen stranger things than her, darker things, maybe, in a past life, or in a mirror. The thought shouldn't be comforting, but it is. And then–

_She's okay?_

Quiet isn't clear on whether her heart's got anything to do with keeping her alive or not anymore– as far as she can tell, it's just a knot of obsolete muscle between her ruined lungs– but she's certain it stopped when he said that.

_She's okay._

After that, V always came alone, would sit cross-legged in the shade against the wall for an hour or so with his iDroid, catching up on whatever logistics needed _the Boss'_  direct attention. Nothing he couldn’t do literally _a_ nywhere else, no, he just _had_ to spend his time between the showers and the hot zone in her field of vision. It pissed her _off_.

At least, it had until she realized: V never tried to speak to her, except once when he asked if she preferred Billy Idol or The Cure and he’d shrugged, put on _White Wedding_ without any cue from her, so that’s one thing they have in common beyond being fucked up walking WMDs. It’s the start of what’s become a running list of parallels. Or a symptom of Stockholm Syndrome. Fuck if she knows. Quiet likes that he’s comfortable with her silence, likes the way he handles his (Big Boss’?) voice with the same precision and acuity as a sniper rifle, only pulls the trigger when he has a straight shot. And, hey, they didn’t kill each other at Aabe Shifap. Still haven’t. It’s not a hundred percent off the table, but–

_Can't you send her on a mission?_

–until then, rotting in solitary confinement feels like a waste of her time. No reason why she can’t work with _Venom Snake._

Quiet steps forward, phases directly through the bars of her cell, crosses her arms. They stare each other down for a few seconds, deadpan, until V folds, gives her one of his odd half-smiles and nudges the case towards her with his foot.

She kneels, runs her hands over the rough plastic before popping the lid. The weapon inside is a Renov, brand new and nested in stiff gray foam. It’s not hers– this one has a suppressor and a stripe of cobalt on the casing, and the scope isn't held on with duct tape. She swallows a sigh. Pulls out the box of ammo, gives V a wry look when she reads the label.

 _“_ Can’t recruit a dead man,” V says simply. “Here.” He passes her a handgun in a leg holster, then a combat knife. Hers, this time. XOF standard issue. And then: a radio collar, complete with an earpiece. “Kaz said you’d have no way to communicate, but…?”

“Mm.” Quiet doesn’t look up from fastening the Delta to her thigh, but her face is burning with surprise at her own response. She’d gotten distracted, trying to figure out who the hell _Kaz_ is– and, oh, of course. Commander Miller. Miller is a fucking mess, part of V as much as her parasites are a part of her. A symbiont festering under his Boss's skin. She saw the black behind his pale eyes the morning she’d shot six bullets between the rotors of the ACC. He leans on V like a second crutch even as he challenges him at every turn, never asks for forgiveness, much less permission, out of control and just asking for it,  _begging_ to be put in his place. Their relationship is not a crossfire she wants to get caught up in, nothing she wants to understand. Miller’s anger, his pain, they make sense to her– she’s the same as him, in more ways than one– but it’s love that makes him dangerous.

Miller can see right through her. When it comes to _Big Boss_ , though, he’s blind.

“Good,” he nods. V moves to clap her on the back as she gets up and then hesitates, reconsiders. He runs a hand through his hair instead, keeps his distance as she snaps the radio transceiver to her belt and slings the Renov over her shoulder. “Let’s go to work.”

 

-

 

MOTHER BASE, COMBAT PLATFORM 4

Seychelles Waters

August 1984

 

05:29

 

 

When it rains in the Seychelles, the clouds hang so low, you can’t see the ocean. Everything turns the same steely shade of gray. Every surface develops a chrome finish of rainwater that makes the metal walkways treacherous and the tarmac shine silver underfoot. At five AM on a day like this, it’s humid, pale, warm, and the far platforms of Mother Base are only identifiable by the aircraft hazard lights blinking on invisible helipads and radio towers set on the horizon.

In other words, it’s a perfect day for target practice.

Quiet is on the edge of the artillery range roof, one knee down, her rifle balanced in her arms. The parasites in her body mean that she could get away with never training again– her vision is beyond perfect, and she’s physically stronger than just about any of the Diamond Dogs– but old habits die hard. She does push ups in her cell, and sometimes V shows her CQC throws while they wait for nightfall out in the field, and now she’s here with her laser sight trained on a target as Ocelot rolls a pair of empty grenade casings in his palm on the deck below her. He'd pulled her aside yesterday, after she and V returned from their latest round of ops in Afghanistan. Said he had something to show her.

“You familiar with the concept of a ricochet shot?”

His voice twangs over the comm and she frowns, turns the volume down a notch.

"Mm."

"Ever learned how?"

“Nnh,” she grunts. Hopes he gets the gist of _No, what the hell, who goes out of their way to fuck up?_ One of the most basic doctrines of firearm safety is _never shoot at a hard, flat surface, or the surface of water._ Deflection guarantees collateral damage.

He gets it. She can see his eyes turn skyward, a hundred meters away, as he draws one of his revolvers with his free hand and fires at the side of a cargo container in one fluid motion. Quiet has no time to flinch before there’s a second report and– _okay, holy shit_ _–_ his bullet has gone straight through one of the targets set up at the far end of the platform.

“It ain’t really your style,” he says, spinning the revolver for effect before jamming it back into its holster. “Too much force behind the projectile, with a sniper round. Especially with something like a Brennan, or a Serval. But you’re running with that tranq Renov a good fifty percent of the time, and that’s no use against heavy infantry or a SKULLS unit. So–“

Ocelot tosses one of the dead grenades, catches it. Throws it again. Higher. “Shoot this.”

She aims automatically, tracks it through the rain as easily as anyone else would follow a signal flare. Fires. The grenade vanishes– she hears the echo of metal on pavement when it lands, but it’s impossible to say where.

“Pretty good,” Ocelot concedes. “With practice, you should be able to control the trajectory. Here.” He throws the second grenade, pitching it up in a wide arc that breaks when her shot knocks it out of the sky, sends it spinning into the fog.

“Even without that kind of control, you’ve got a solid diversionary tactic that should give Snake an opening without revealing your sniping point.” He looks up at her. The rain has plastered his thin hair to his neck and he has to squint to see her. Blinks water from his eyes. “I’ve sent him the briefing tape already.”

Quiet smirks. Right. He’s taught her a new trick, like she’s the same as that lanky one-eyed wolf pup he's so fond of. She’s seen him training it to hold a knife in its mouth, as if a set of fangs isn’t enough. Watched him repeat commands for hours on end out on the Intel Platform. Get him. Sit. Stay.

_Speak._

Heat blooms under her skin, turns it black around her eyes, sends a shiver down her spine. _Fuck_ it all, so maybe she’s a dog, following V’s orders, covering his back, doing her goddamned best to make sure he can get out of whatever insane situation he dives into. In six weeks they’ve been all around Angola, Zaire, Kabul, coming back covered in mud, sand, blood, and (in V’s case) sewage, getting high on adrenaline and his wormwood cigars, grinning more than they should when they overhear the 40th Army boys speak of monsters, of the horned mercenary and the ghost at his heels.

Anyone can kill a man, but keeping him alive? That’s a hell of a challenge.

Maybe she likes it.

 

-

  

OBTAINED TAPE: [HERE COMES THE RAIN AGAIN]

 

-


	4. RICOCHET

MOTHER BASE, R&D PLATFORM 1

Seychelles Waters

September 1984

20:16

 

 

The evening is clear, the perpetual chill of the sea warmed by the setting sun and a breeze drifting in from the African mainland. Quiet can almost smell the Savannah laced through the asphalt and the brine and the steel, can almost feel the familiar red earth beneath her boots. Still, even her inhuman eyes can only see the horizon. It’s a view she used to find comforting. When V had first brought her in, she’d been relieved to find Mother Base isolated, cut off from the rest of the world by an empty ocean. A few hundred deaths, rather than a few hundred million, if she spoke, if she ran into the _other_  Big Boss. At the time that had been acceptable collateral. One of the best-case scenarios. She gave up on counting her kills in 1976.

Now…

She’s standing on one of the upper decks of the Combat platform, one arm hooked around a gun turret, humming a measure of a song she doesn’t know. Her heart is thick and foul in her throat. Skull Face is dead, XOF eviscerated, OKB Zero back under Soviet control, her mission over before she got a chance to fuck it up properly– though, if she’s honest, she gave up on her objective long before her former commanding officer bit the dust, isn’t that right?

_Now…_

Eight days ago, V walked into the quarantine facility and put down over two dozen of their best men and women. Final body count was thirty-five. He and Miller stayed up all night afterwards watching the coffins burn, human ash on their faces, in their mouths, coating their bloody hands the way sand was sometimes put down to absorb fuel spills in the chopper hangar. At the funeral… it had been easier to pull her camo stunt, to hang back unseen in the shadow of an air duct. Even if she could speak, what was there to say? Death is a given in their line of work. Every soldier on Mother Base knows well what they signed on for. Every one of them would lay down and die for their Boss, moreso now that they’ve seen: he’ll take your heart in his hands, put a gun to your head, and _do it himself_.

Quiet recognized a few of the code names on the incident report, regrets the loss, but what really hurts is–

_We are not responsible to judge an enemy._

She would’ve spat in V’s face if she’d heard those words six months ago, but what happened at Aabe Shifap is no different, is it? He spared her, the half-wild XOF doomsday assassin, the same way he’d dropped that sniveling son of a bitch Emmerich in a life raft, the same way he (in that other life) shanghaied Miller in Colombia back in 1972, the same way they’ve been Fultoning in new “recruits” left and right. She’s nothing special, and it’s a fucking salve on her ego, knowing she’s not the only one who can’t take the shot when Big Boss gives you an opening, body double or no.

Miller’s been giving V the– ha– the silent treatment since Emmerich’s trial, and she gets it, she really does. His need for vengeance, the instinct to counterstrike, that’s in her too and it runs deeper than any notion she has of a greater good, of a just cause. If she was the kind of person who did the right thing she would’ve put a bullet in her own skull the day she found out about the English strain.

As it turns out, she’s the kind of person who’d put her own petty revenge fantasy over genocide.

_That_ hurts.

Her eyes fall to her bicep, the one sheathed in the BIO-CHEM glove. R&D had sewn a bona fide Diamond Dogs patch on it yesterday, fitted it with [her diamond](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7928743) and everything. It catches the sun whenever she moves, a warning sign bright as the wings of a butterfly. _A shining light to our brothers in arms, even in– sometimes the battlefield tells you more than who’s an enemy and–_

The security patrols stand at attention, now, when she walks between her cell and the ACC. Stone Hawk from the Support unit hadn’t quite punched her shoulder, but he had called her “Diamond Bitch” with an apologetic half-grin when he’d brought her a new suppressor and a box of anti-material rounds, because the Soviets've been patrolling in armored Kamovs, these days. She’d punched _his_ shoulder.

“Hey, hey, I get it. What about Naked Hound, then? The Boss’ old code name was–“

She knows. 

_You really have his back, out there._

Quiet covers her mouth with her free hand, then locks her fingers around her neck. Killing is her job. Killing has always been her _job_. She can feel the pressure on her throat, tendons grinding together beneath her palm, marvels at the phenomenon of choking while breathing freely. The horizon before her is flat, unyielding. Skull Face had played on her pride, her professionalism, called her his _gun_ , but she knows better now. She knows–

She knows the bastard had set her up to fail from the moment she came to at Ngumba. If Big Boss died at her hand or if he kicked her ass back to the Mediterranean again, it never mattered. All Skull Face had been counting on was that she would break and become the last weapon in the last war in his brave new world. 

Quiet knows she wasn’t the vector for the second parasite outbreak on Mother Base– she’d be fucking dead if she was– but nothing changes the fact that it’s possible that next time, it won't be up to her anymore. If the Kikongo strain can mutate apropos of fucking nothing, because of Emmerich’s fucking infrared waves or whatever, then the _English_ –

She relaxes her grip on her neck slowly, skims over the darkening bruises with her fingertips. Turns her gaze from the horizon to the network of platforms sprawling out over the water below. A real contender for the eighth wonder of the world, and her home, in spite of everything. There's no point freaking out about hypotheticals. She knows what she has to do. She–

“Nice sunset,” V says, and she nearly snaps invisible, roped out of her fractured thoughts by the low rumble of his voice. He pulls himself up beside her– of _course_ she hadn’t heard him coming at all. Classic. Quiet swallows her surprise, hums an assent. Folds her legs under her to sit next to him as he settles down, lights up a cigar. Against her skin, the asphalt is still hot from the sun, tastes like sea spray and tar.

V looks like shit. He always looks like shit, one way or another. Even when he’s not picking human cartilage out of the joints of his prosthetic and hasn’t spent the night sweating in a dumpster, exhaustion and a certain brand of melancholy hang over him like a thunderhead– but sometimes, it seems to her, he’ll step into the eye of the storm, and then– _and_ _then_ …

-

YAKHO OBOO SUPPLY OUTPOST

Northern Kabul, Afghanistan

July 1984

00:18

…It’s their fifth mission together. Cut and dry prisoner extraction. One of the Intel field agents had gotten ambitious with his assignment, fucked himself over. The distance V’s men and women are willing to go for him is admirable, but the greater risk means there's a greater chance of the Boss having to come in and clean up. That’s the plan Miller laid out in the briefing tape– get into the Yakho Oboo supply outpost, get their man, and get out again. Typical Friday night.

V doesn’t seem to mind that the job is the black ops equivalent of a fucking coffee run. He handles every task with the same solemn care, whether it’shigh-priority target elimination or clearing mines for one of Miller’s countless NGO contacts. It left her rattled, at first. She had thought his humility an act, the same kind of pretentious holier-than-thou bullshit that Skull Face indulged in, but it’s not like that at all. It’s that nothing is beneath him. Yeah, he’ll choke an enemy unconscious rather than knife them, nine times out of ten, but that’s because slitting someone’s throat is messy as hell. The tranq weapons really are about convenience, recruitment– waste not, want not. No moral high ground there. Quiet’s seen him pop open a man’s ribs like a soda can with his bionic hand, and later the same day he’d gone waist-deep into a thicket and emerged with an armful of brilliant blue flowers. Medicinal plants, he’d explained, diffusing her warning glare. “They’re not for you.” Deadpan. She’d almost smiled.

And so here she is, camped out on a cliff overlooking Yakho Oboo, scope trained on the lone guard smoking in front of the compound’s back gate. She hates her sniping point. No visual on the inner courtyard at all, no way of knowing what’s going on apart from the steady pattern of V’s breathing in her ear– but he’d given her an order, and it’s not like she can argue. Even if she physically _could_ argue, he’s her commanding officer now. If he gets shot up because he lacks the foresight to let her cover his ass, that’s on him and one-hundred-percent not her problem.

…so maybe she’s kinda pissed that he doesn’t seem to need her. Whatever. V may be satisfied getting his hands dirty on basic bitch assignments but this feels distinctly beneath her pay grade, and–

_–and that’s exactly the unpleasant attitude that got you burned alive._ The thought plays back in Skull Face’s voice, and she shudders involuntarily, tries to shake it off. Fine. If covering the north exit is her job, she’ll cover the fucking north exit.

Quiet starts humming. It’s been thirteen minutes since V crawled into a storm drain, two since he made contact with the target. No sign of activity in the outpost– she can hear the faint crackle of a radio, the drone of an anti-air radar, snatches of casual conversation, and the night is clear, tranquil, as peaceful as it gets in an active war zone. The unlucky Soviet in her scope flicks his cigarette to the ground, scuffs it out–

“Fire.”

The command hits her like 60,000 volts. Her shot nails the guard in the neck and half a minute later, V steps out of the shadows with the target over his back, pushes through the chainlink gate shoulder-first. Quiet rises as he scales the embankment up to her sniping point, dusts the grit from her elbows. The Intel agent is shaking, bleeding, worse for wear, but he’s in one piece, and his jaw is set. He curses in Russian when V sets him down, then nearly bites his tongue off when he catches sight of her with a cleaning rod halfway down the barrel of her rifle.

“B-boss… _Tixij_ –”

“Sly Mustang, right?”

To his credit, Mustang stays pretty calm, nods, just once. He’s been out in the field so long that last time he was on Mother Base, she was in solitary 24/7. Seeing her at his Boss’ side in the hot zone is probably the last thing he expected, but then, when you’re a Diamond Dog, you learn to roll with the punches. 

“Relax. Quiet’s with us.” V gives her a vague nod. “Can you walk?”

“She’s– yes, Boss.” Mustang dutifully tries to get his legs under him but V shoves him back to the dirt with a hand on his shoulder. Drops a few items into his lap– bandages, a packet of pentazemin, his canteen.

“Get yourself cleaned up. It’s an hour to the LZ,” V says, and leaves him to it, sits on a discarded tire to talk into his comm. “…yeah, it went fine. Target’s fine. No. No, you’re right. Put him on security detail when he gets out of medbay. Hm–? Oh, she…” He glances up at Quiet, works something out of his bag and passes it to her. It’s a cassette tape with a peeling label, handwritten in Cyrillic.

「 Глория 」

She actually opens her mouth, because, is he fucking serious? It’s a hard call to make. V’s face is blank, unreadable, save for a question reflected back at her. Quiet turns the tape over in her hands, seething, off-balance, acutely aware that he’s still on the line with Miller, but he’s staring at _her_ , and–

“…mhm. Crack shot.” The exasperated hiss on the other end of the frequency is loud enough that Quiet can hear the static. She rolls her eyes, and, there– the corner of V’s mouth twitches into a smile. She can’t help it: she flips him off, and that starts him laughing. It’s wolfish, soft, heavy with warmth that melts the tension between them like rubber on asphalt in the Afghan sun. She lets the heat soak under her skin, and it stays there.

-

MUNOKO YA NIOKA STATION

Angola-Zaire Border Region

August 1984

15:07

_And you really don’t remember, was it something that he said?_

_All the voices in your head, calling–_

The twenty-ninth mission has them running full-tilt through mud up to their ankles and rain that’s coming down so hard and fast it’s hard to see, let alone breathe. The klaxon of the station alarm wails behind them, harmonizing with strangled shouts and the staccato of gunfire. A flare bursts just shy of their four o’clock, lights up the pitch dark of the afternoon storm for a few seconds before fizzling out, extinguished by the rain.Quiet doesn’t look back. The flare means the Rogue Coyote soldiers don’t have a visual, that every stray bullet following their footprints is just a lucky shot.

Lucky, like the round in her thigh or the shrapnel studding up her back and ass from where she’d tripped a mine on the way down from her sniping point after V snarled over their codec to _move, they have a CGM_ – anyone else would’ve lost a limb, and certainly wouldn’t be bolting through what feels like a fucking waterfall while missing a boot. She’s not positive why the situation went from “bad” to “absolute clusterfuck” but that’s something to think about once they’re at cruising altitude, and not before.

_Gloria, I think they’ve got your number_

_I think they’ve got the alias that you’ve been living under–_

Quiet hears the chopper before she sees it, smirks through the water and blood streaked across her face. Pequod’s sense of humor is unmistakable. The pilot is irrepressibly good-natured and kind of a jackass– has to be, to survive a typical work day. It’s just like him to be blasting pop from his Blackfoot’s speakers in a torrential downpour during an emergency extraction, and, really? That’s why he’s their pilot. The other guys tend to stick with Wagner.

V reaches the LZ first, crashes into the helicopter with enough force that it banks down and hauls himself onboard. Quiet’s next to him on the pallet before he can get his balance, has her rifle trained on the canyon as Pequod pulls them into an ascent. She keeps it cocked until the doors slide shut and the roar of the storm fades behind the beat of the engine and V’s labored panting.

“All set, Boss?” Pequod turns down the music, spares them a glance over his shoulder.

V hesitates. He’s running hot, Quiet can see it as plain as she can see the blood leaking out of his sneaking suit, just under his ribs. The bitch idiot wants to dive right back into the Snake’s Mouth. That makes two of them, then, but they’ve cleared their primary objective already and the sirens are still howling. “Yeah. Take us home.”

“Copy that.”

And that’s the last anyone says for a while. V begins the arduous ritual of peeling off his suit, wincing when the material sticks to his wounds. Quiet just kicks off her remaining boot and lays back on the bench. She’s shaking on the comedown from the adrenaline high as the events of the last hour catch up with her and she gives in to it, lets the parasites drink the rainwater on her skin, then gags on the taste of charred metal and acrid, oily mud.

“You okay?” V asks. He’s naked save for a faded bomber jacket over his shoulders. Nothing she hasn’t seen before– neither of them have any business being shy– but he’s so encrusted with red, with earth and blood and swollen scar tissue, she can’t look away. Black floods around her eyes, cuts everything into sharp focus like the facets of a diamond. God damn it. 

Quiet sits up, groans as the shrapnel digs deeper into her back. Now that she’s paying attention, she can feel every piece of metal and lead in her, can feel the parasites surging. The wound in her thigh is bleeding freely all over the canvas seat. She strips off her equipment, then her tights, which finally tear apart halfway down. By the time she’s untangled herself, V is kneeling by her side with the chopper’s first aid kit, forceps already in hand. She reaches for them, but he swats her away, gives her a _look_.

_Let me._

She watches pointedly as he works. He pries her flesh apart, away from the bullet, with a practiced confidence rare even in the ranks of the elite XOF strike force back when she knew them. She wonders if he’s had medical training, if it’s something Big Boss learned in his days with the CIA or if it’s a remnant from someone else’s life. The cool metal of his bionic hand holds her still, gives her a point of focus beyond the pain. When he relaxes his grip she moves, all instinct, wraps her fingers around the casing right over where his bone gives way to steel. Pulls him closer.

Kissing Venom Snake feels like the right thing to do. He tastes like sweat and stale smoke, and his mouth is soft against hers, opens easily. Quiet catches his lower lip in her teeth, presses her tongue to the scar there. His hand– the human one– closes over the parasites glittering blue and black in the open wound in her thigh. Heat rolls off him like radiation and there’s a wild moment where she’s sure that if she keeps touching him, she’ll die– not now, but months, years, decades down the line, poisoned. Even if that were true, does it matter?

_C’mon, hotshot, we’re already dead._

He lets her have her way for another minute or so, kisses her back at uneven intervals in a way that’s not exactly practiced but is definitely controlled. Careful. Like he’s gauging her reaction. If this is how he handles _Miller_ –

Quiet bites down, hard, because she hates that idea, hates that there’s a high chance she’s _right_.

_…in love with the legend… I was the same way, once._

For an alleged expert on the subject, Ocelot sure has a shit read on people sometimes. Miller’s the one obsessed with Big Boss, his Snake, the constrictor that swallowed him whole in a Colombian jungle in 1972. She wants nothing to do with the _legend_. The legend can go fuck himself raw. She’s in–

She’s in real danger, but hey, when’s the last time she played it safe?

When V pulls back, he's licking her blood from his hand. Quiet’s hypnotized by it, stares as his tongue slides between his fingers, consuming her with an expression that’s placid and feral in equal measure. Her parasites flicker and die between his teeth, and for the first time since Aabe Shifap, she has nothing to say. She can’t tell if she wants him to kill her or fuck her or what but there aren’t words for it, not in Navajo, or Pashto, or English. 

“Turn around,” he says, and for a split second, yeah, it’s absolutely that she wants him to eat her the fuck out right here in the helicopter, half a meter from their pilot with every frequency transmitting live back to the Intel team at Mother Base. Quiet does as she’s told, kneels down on the floor with her back to him. She shivers violently at the pressure of his hands on her back. Allows herself just one sharp bark of laughter when– _of course_ – he starts calmly picking out shards of metal from her shoulders. He hums, appreciative. Patient. Tame.

It’s not that she wants him to kill her. It’s that–

 

-

 

LUFWA VALLEY

Angola-Zaire Border Region

August 1984

06:02

 

 

“You’re better than this.”

Quiet actually opens her mouth at that, teeth bared in an empty snarl that leaves her throat ragged. She’s not in the fucking mood for this shit, not from _Venom Snake_ of all people, who knows better than anyone that, no, she’s _not_ above putting four bullets in the brains of four unconscious women. It should be cut and dry at this point, kill them and move on, but V’s hesitating and she has a pretty good idea _why._

Still, her finger’s curled around the trigger of her Delta, slippery with blood from a graze on her arm she doesn’t remember. The gun is cold in her hand.

“ _Quiet._ ”

V has made no move to step between her and the sniper SKULLS, who are down and out and prone where he’s dragged them, almost invisible in the thick undergrowth. He’s crouching near one of them, tracing the number tattooed on her forehead with his prosthesis. As if it means anything to him.

It clearly does. “They’re XOF,” he says, toneless, staring at her through cigar smoke that’s curling through the mist like oil in water. Like she’s got anything to say about it.

She doesn’t _,_ so instead she clicks the safety off, furious. V’s expression is unreadable.They don’t have _time_ for this, his men are dying and the fate of the Diamond Dogs, individually and as a business venture, rests in the hands of an old man who may already be dead. The way the op’s been going, she wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve been slogging through the jungle all night for a corpse.

That’s on her. The plan had been to keep low along the river valley, to use the sound of the waterfall to mask their ascent towards the their target’s alleged location. V told her to scout ahead, to check out the manor, Zero Risk Security’s patrol routes, any security cameras or whatever, but like _hell_ she was gonna let him go it alone. Not after she watched a laser sight cut across his face.

So she’d straight up disobeyed a direct order and shot one of the SKULLS in the skull, started a firefight that neither she nor her boss were really equipped for, wasted precious time because sure, she can’t fucking stand the idea that–

She got scared. 

That’s all it comes down to. She could claim tactics but no one will hear it from her anyway, so she may as well be fucking honest: she’s finally found something in Africa that cuts her to the core and it’s because looking at it is like looking in a cracked mirror, because she knows Venom Snake sees it too and it’s not a flattering reflection.

Her own vanity is _really_ starting to piss her off.

Quiet spits in the mud, cocks her gun, jerks her head at V to _move._ Out of the way.

When he stands down, that’s when she knows–

 

-

MOTHER BASE, R&D PLATFORM 1

Seychelles Waters

September 1984

20:21

_His life isn’t yours to take._

Quiet smiles, keeps her gaze locked on the horizon. Black water against black sky, shot in two by a lingering streak of gold. She can see the ember of V’s cigar out of the corner of her eye. Without turning, she reaches around, nicks the cigar and clamps it in her teeth. She can’t really smoke– no functioning lungs– but the action is comforting, all the same, and V makes no move to take it back.

He’s clicking his lighter over and over, letting it singe his fingers.

She would burn down the world to speak to him, and that’s, ha, that’s the _problem_. His life isn’t hers to take, it was given to her to protect. She’s failed at every possible opportunity since Cyprus but there’s no chance in hell of her fucking up this time, and it’ll be what kills her. That’s fine. XOF is nothing anymore, and besides– she’s the best goddamn vanguard sharpshooter outside Heaven.

_You’re going to regret this._

Funny, that Miller was right about everything after all.

-

OBTAINED TAPE: [GLORIA]

-

 


	5. THE OTHER SHADOW

██████████

██████, Afghanistan

April 1985

 

04:43

 

 

_“It’s raining.”_

_She rolls open the door of the ACC and V’s right, a storm’s come in along with the pale Seychelles fog. Quiet doesn’t wait for Pequod to bring the chopper down– it’s been ten hours since their layover on the coast of Oman and she can land a sixty meter jump. She hits the Command platform hard, breathing in the humidity and the warmth from the silvered tarmac through every pore of her skin. Steps out of her boots. Falls to her knees, skims her hands through the water pooling on the deck, and–_

_–she’s flat on her back and_ he’s _standing over her, mouth uneven as he bites back words. The rain has passed and the sun is cutting between them. It’s all so blindingly bright. It’s all so–_

Quiet arches her back, opens her eyes to a leaden sky. The world is indistinct, silent, still. Her skin is coated in a fine layer of dew and sand, worn raw in places and smothered in others. Everything feels numb.

Oh. She’s dead, again.

Quiet laughs, and _that_ hurts, rips up her throat on the way out, tastes like iron, fades into the predawn light before she registers that she’s the one who’s laughing.

Her heart launches into overdrive at the sound of her own voice, sends her from zero to sixty in a second flat. She almost gets to her feet before vertigo takes over and she collapses, curls her fingers into the sand and just _screams._ This is not what she’d planned for, not what she wanted. What good is dying if you keep _waking up–_

_The Red Army finally came for them.Some crack commando mobilized what felt like an entire fucking battalion of tanks when he heard Big Boss and Tixij were trapped in a foxhole together at Lamar Khaate. She’s not spiritual, never could afford to think too much about the afterlife, but maybe there’s some truth to the idea of karma. Maybe this is what she’s had coming to her for everything she’s done, everything she's been, for being too much of a coward to do the right thing and walk into the Indian Ocean when she had the chance._

_It strikes her, as she’s triangulating a shot from the roof of the palace, that this isn’t the kind of artillery sent to take down a two-man army. Her Brennan is light in the crook of her arm, rips a man in half when she pulls the trigger._

_This is the kind of artillery sent to neutralize a PF with a weapon of ma–_

_“I did not choose to be Quiet.”_

_One shot at recording over a tape and she doesn’t know what she’s saying. English is a tool she’s no longer used to handling, but the language she and the weapon called Venom Snake share doesn’t exist. Her tongue gets clipped in her teeth and she chokes on an accent she’d forgotten, on words she knows aren’t the right ones. She tastes bile._

_This is what she wanted, isn’t it? To be–_

_–sick as a dog, hacking up acid and blood and shreds of her own gut. Cysts rise hard as leather on her chest, leak fluid that coats her hands and her gear. At some point she shoves the barrel of her pistol down her throat just to get it over with, only to be met with the echo of an empty chamber and another fit of uncontrollable coughing. Her knife is similarly ineffective, carves into her neck just fine but the parasites–_ her _parasites– won’t let the wound bleed out._

_There’s no way to kill yourself with a Brennan._

_She loses track of time, trapped in a body that won’t die because it was never properly alive to begin with. Her lungs are charcoal, not enough to feed the new life teeming in what’s left of her respiratory system, and the vocal cord parasites begin to starve. To rot. Septicemia sets in, along with a fever she’s too dehydrated to sweat out. White sand burns like salt and she knows she’s going to drown here, in an ocean of fire, alone, but it’s what she wanted. V will live and that is what she wanted._

Right?

The desert has no answers for her. Quiet sits up– more carefully, this time– and, because it’s what she was built to do, she lets her decade of survival training take over. Placing her location comes first. She’s no more than a few klicks from Lamar Khaate, definitely outside the usual area of operations. Maybe as far south as Logar, though she doubts it. There are no stars in the sky, nothing but the distant haze of the sunrise to give her any sense of direction.

Inventory is straightforward. Her clothes are falling apart, stiff with her own dried fluids. She removes them, a process that takes off layers of her skin, ends with her bleeding and tracing her hands over her body, searching for scraps of foreign material. She finds: a ropy scar that runs from her jaw to her collarbone. A latticed pattern of variegation pitted over her ribs, left by the parasite larvae. Sand in every fucking crevice. Her hair is disgusting, matted and loose around her shoulders, _wet_.

Daylight clears the last of the clouds from what must’ve been a hell of a storm, shows her a landscape transformed. Wildflowers bloom out of the sand as far as she can see, paint the dunes saffron and lavender, blood-red, indigo and blazing gold. It’s spring.

So, that’s what saved her.

Her Delta and her knife are nowhere to be found, but her rifle’s jutting out of the flowers, a grave scratched and useless from however many months of exposure. She leaves it. The sun keeps rising, gives her the strength to stand, to open her mouth and speak into the empty air.

Nothing, aside from searing pain in her trachea. The damage her knife inflicted hasn’t healed properly, never will, but the vocal cord parasites are gone. She tries again, louder.

“- – _f- ck–_ “

Blood pools over her tongue and Quiet spits, grinning in spite of herself, ready to howl. She keeps a hand on her throat instead, whispers something so faint she can’t hear it, and that’s enough. She’s _okay_. She’s really fucking fucked, but she’s– a flood of adrenaline washes over her, leaves her empty, crystal-clear.

She doesn’t need words, where she’s going.

 

_-_

 

DA WIALO KALLAI

Northern Kabul, Afghanistan

April 1985

 

13:00

 

 

A country that’s endured centuries of human warfare is not easily altered by a single winter– and it _has_ been just one, she hears the date on a radio left running in a parked Soviet cargo truck. _Clear skies, high of 17 today. Watch out for a cold front and chances of rain approaching towards the end of the week._

1985\. _Happy New Year._

Quiet picks out the differences all the same as she travels north, following a familiar route from the desert to the foothills of the Wawre Prang. Fresh rifts in abandoned buildings, Magloaders at Spugmay, bullet casings crunching into gravel under her boots. Even the backroads are patrolled, now, but she keeps close to them in dry scrub that’s thick with flowers, a shade greener than it was before the rains came. She can smell the snow off the mountains, can taste it with every exposed inch of her skin. It feels clean.

She carries her diamond with her. It’s one of the few things she brought back from the desert: her loadout amounts to half a box of anti-material rounds and a flash grenade, and she’s naked save for her boots and her belt until she steals a new knife and a poncho from Guard Post 24. The heavy canvas fucks with her breathing but it keeps her warm, the knife gives her the edge up when she finds a sniper team in the Shin basin. Quiet kills the spotter outright, tries holding up the gunman the way she’s seen V do countless times before she remembers she can’t interrogate him.His death is sloppy, uncomfortable for both of them, and she comes out of it with his Bambetov slung over her shoulders. Semi-automatic, yeah, but it has a suppressor. Running ops with V has reset her priorities in all kinds of ways.

It also means this is her sixth time scouting Wialo. The Soviets have dug in deep– in the middle of the day, the village is a flurry of activity, loud and thrumming and obnoxious. V would’ve waited for the cover of darkness but she prefers the sun and the electric current it sets off in her. Quiet skirts behind a drill sergeant putting his men through their paces, around a convoy of armored vehicles idling on the main road, ends up walking smack into a sentry on his smoke break. He barely has time to go white with recognition before she cracks his head into a wall and stuffs him– concussed, but alive– into a dumpster. Let him wake up and tell his comrades what he’s seen: the naked sniper is back _._ Tixij's _back._

And, to be honest, she could stand to go through at least four rounds of quarterly retraining. It’s not until she’s standing in the base’s HQ in front of the radio transmitter with a stack of intel files in her hands that it occurs to her she can’t fucking read Cyrillic. Not with the degree of literacy needed to parse bureaucratic military technobabble, anyway. She suddenly misses Ocelot and Miller’s grating rapport in her ear and, more than that, the sheer power of the Diamond Dogs Intel team.

Well– she’s working on it.

Quiet retreats to the roof of a building out on the edge of town with a bootleg Walkman, a collection of unmarked tapes, and, because she’s feeling good, one of the Wialo commander’s cigarettes. She phases invisible behind a satellite dish and starts listening.

The first two cassettes are botched interrogations concerning the Mujahideen armament and force strength. Another is in code– she lasts about forty-five seconds through that one– and three more are variously tinny attempts at a rip of Journey’s _Separate Ways._ She catches a brief mention of _Diamond Dogs_ on the next tape but it’s something about nuclear disarmament, a major deployment in South Africa, the ongoing PF problem, et cetera. Not a word about “Big Boss.” Quiet chews the butt of her cigarette, spits it in a neat arc to the dust below. She’s not _nervous,_ not exactly– she knows this pattern by heart. If there’s no sign of him, he’s doing well. What she _is_ is pleasantly annoyed.

She gets comfortable, cross-legged. Snags a few more cigarettes, a few more tapes, keeps hitting play. It takes all night to get through every recording she can get her hands on. By dawn, her Russian comprehension has improved tenfold and she’s more or less caught up on current events– not her goal going in, but not a bad outcome, either– and she still has nothing on her _target_. She keeps two of the tapes: one details an incident on 12 October 1984 that resulted in the loss of fifteen combat vehicles and a platoon’s worth of men to a sandstorm in the Leke Desert. The other is a copy of a song she hasn’t heard before.

Da Wialo Kallai grows restless under her watch. Days blur together and the men start jumping at shadows, down each other’s throats, at the chance to transfer to another assignment.

_–shut the fuck up._

_I_ saw _her– and, y’know, at Lamar Khaate, I heard there was–_

_There were no survivors at Lamar Khaate. Like I said, shut up. Phantoms–_

(–don’t exist.)

Quiet ignores them, makes no special effort to hide the traces of her presence. Total stealth is V’s modus operandi, not hers. All she’s concerned with is the communications array and the disturbing theory that the Diamond Dogs may have pulled out of the Kabul province entirely, moved on to a more _cost-effective_ theater. The lull has her on edge. Hunting Big Boss last year had been a goddamn pain in her neck but at least she’d been _hunting,_ hot on a trail that was often cryptic but never cold _._ Tracking him up and down Afghanistan was second nature. Now she feels like a dog kept too long in a kennel, but all she has to go on is the knowledge that–

_–the Phantom is not–_

The hour the words _unidentified enemy combatant_ burst over the radio is the hour she leaves.

 

-

  

AABE SHIFAP RUINS

Northern Kabul, Afghanistan

May 1985

 

05:52

 

 

Eleven months to the day and she’s watching the world through a scope again.

Instinct drives her northwest, past the last point of contact with _the enemy_ , sends her walking against the current of the Yakho Oboo river to the place she should’ve run to from the beginning.

The ruins have lost a hundred years to her one. Pink glows where the sandstone’s been torn up by artillery fire, caterpillar track, combat boots, but the main arch and the columns that flank it are still standing sharp against the pale predawn sky. With no one left to remember what they are, they’ve become just another battleground.

It’s quiet, but not silent. Quiet does not tread lightly as she makes her way through the gutted monument and the echoes of her footsteps linger low to the ground, fade into the rush of the river and the wind and the careful constant of her own humming– but it’s the sound of what she can’t hear that deafens her. A shot thunders through her mind on loop, intercut with measures of a song she can't shake off and a conversation that never–

_What happened?_

_At Cyprus? I died, and you–_

–never happened, so she hums louder and touches her fingers to the back of her skull.

  

_Even while we sleep, we will find_

_You acting on your best behavior_

_Turn your back on mother nature–_

 

The scar is faint but she can still feel where the bone knit back together. 

 

_Everybody wants to–_

 

Quiet scales the archway like it’s nothing. It’s still the best sniping point on site, affords her a panorama of the valley and a direct view of the road winding up from the south. The breeze is warm and strong and carries the scent of rain, burns off the cold that had settled deep in her bones from the night and the stars and the river. It whips her hair around her face as she loads her rifle, as she unscrews the suppressor without really thinking, gives everything over to muscle memory. She lines up her shot, and waits. The sun rises.

 

_All for freedom and for pleasure_

_Nothing ever lasts forever_

_Everybody wants to rule the–_

 

 

-

  

06:15

 

 

When you pull the trigger of a gun, there’s a pause between inhale and exhale, the beat before the base drops. Take it slow. Five pounds of pressure for a Renov, twelve for the Brennan, ten for any M-2000. Four for this semi-auto Soviet bullshit. _Let the shot surprise you._ It’s years since Quiet has been caught off guard by any kind of gunfire, and maybe that’s no good, a red mark on the permanent record of her morality, but it’s not anything she’d change today. This is who she is. This is breathing.

It feels right, to find him like this, framed in a crosshair.

She takes the shot.

  

-

  

06:16

 

 

Her bullet hits the dirt a meter to his right and Venom Snake’s hand goes to his gun. He keeps his eye trained on her sniping point, blinking against the glint of her scope, perfectly still. Endlessly patient. He's fast but he knows better than to bolt, keeps his pace measured as he slips down into the ruins, and she can tell he’s being deliberately obvious, the bastard. It’s the same way he used to move back when they first started working together, when he wanted to make sure she knew where he was.

This is a language they share, this pattern of signal and silence, built on memories that aren’t supposed to exist.

Quiet meets him halfway.

The scars cut into his face seem deeper, more like cracks than sutures. There’s a trickle of blood leaking from the shrapnel in his forehead. His sneaking suit is closer to gray than black, faded out, coated with dust. V looks like he’s the one who spent a winter dead in the desert, and there’s a part of her that wonders if he did because he approaches her like a wounded animal. Like he can’t trust what he’s seeing.

How many things has he seen, that weren't there?

He doesn’t speak. Quiet steps into his shadow and for a drawn-out, painful minute they just fucking _stare_ at each other. When V finally touches her he’s cautious, deliberate, metal and flesh tracing over the scarring on her ribs with agonizing care, as if any pressure will cause the mirage to shatter, lost, nothing more than blank tape spooling out into the day.  It’s not until his hands cup her face and he thumbs away a tear that she realizes she’s crying. The salt is leaving raw red streaks along her jaw but she can’t seem to stop, she–

She grabs him, crushes him to her in an embrace so close she can taste dust, blood, sweat, hints of something else. V tenses, unsure of where to put his hands, settles for the hard muscle knotted over her shoulder blades. Right on her skin. It’s suffocating, being held like this, but she hangs on as long as she can. When she pulls away for air she keeps her arms hooked around his neck and he understands, lets her breathe. 

“Kept y–“ V hesitates, swallows his words. Offers her a wry smile instead.

“We…” He presses his forehead to hers. She can taste the _fear_ in his sweat, the metal of the shrapnel in his skull. “ _I…_ ”

Words fail him, so Venom Snake sighs, leans into her.

She fits her palm under the collar of the sneaking suit, against the back of his neck. He’s feverish beneath the aramid, pliant and heavy as she eases him down, patient as she starts undoing the fastenings of the suit. V makes a curious noise when she peels it open, bares his neck for her. Dust settles over their skin, warm and too soft.

When she’s satisfied– when the sculpted plates of the sneaking suit have been folded away and she’s pulled off all the tape that keeps his radio kit in place– Quiet presses her lips to the hollow of his neck, along the pale line left by the wire. 

And that’s when his comm goes off, resets the situation to _normal,_ all at once.

It’s Ocelot. “ _Snake, talk to me– what the hell was–_ “

“Sniper,” V says easily. “Missed me by a mile, but… might be worth it, to bring her in.”

_“We don’t need anyone who can’t hit a– hold up. Her?”_

“Mm,” Quiet cuts in, grinning, wiping blood and snot from her face. On the other end of the line, Ocelot huffs in disbelief.

“ _Is that–?”_

“Quiet,” V runs a palm up the barrel of her rifle, humming low in his throat. A question. She jerks her head _no._

_“Hear that, Miller? Our silent assassin’s back.”_

Miller’s reply is biting, uncharacteristically vague, far away. It takes V a second to reply. “Kaz…”

 _"Bring her in, then,"_ Miller spits. And then, acidly:  _"Maybe she can tell us why, and how, XOF knew where to find–"_

_"Enough."_

"We... we'll get there, Kaz. Now is not the time." She wants to push on what happened with XOF but V's eyes are on her neck, on her scar, like he's got the medical goggles on and can see the green light pulsing in her vocal cords. They'll have to square with that sooner or later, too. For now, though– "We have a job."

 _“We still have her on file,”_ Ocelot drawls. “ _Won’t be difficult to set up a support channel… I’ll handle it.”_

V nods. “Good. She needs… a uniform, a radio kit, and a new rifle. Today. I want to be at Smasei in forty-eight hours.”

_“I’ll send a Molotok.”_

She can hear Miller choke out a protest in the background and V sighs lightly _,_ tunes out of the frequency as his seconds-in-command start going at it. Meets her gaze. “The commander at Da Smasei Laman is thinking of… outsourcing,” he explains. “A rep from the PF Love Machine is en route now to negotiate terms… we’re gonna offer them a better deal.”

V lights up his ridiculous e-cigar as he breaks down the mission parameters, the plan of attack, their new connections in Pakistan. He says nothing about the desert, snakes, the river water leaking from her boots, nothing about Skull Face, nothing, nothing. A familiar flash of irritation courses through her, and she smirks, folds her tongue over her teeth, because it’s all _so like him._ So like _her_.

She missed this.

“You in?”

Quiet gives him a thumbs-up. Their shadows melt together, long and dark, as they walk with their backs to the sun.

 

-

  

 

OBTAINED TAPE: [EVERYBODY WANTS TO RULE THE WORLD]

 

 

-


	6. Side B

**CMMD-001 SURVEILLANCE05-14-85 00:00-04:00**

 

_“You knew right away, didn’t you? Right from the start.”_

_“…”_

_“How?”_

_“…”_

_“I guess we see what we want to believe.”_

_“Hm.”_

_“Fuck you.”_

_“…”_

_“There’s nothing there, y’know. That– that thing– it's just a gun, and trust me, it’s not my finger on the trigger. If it was– hey, maybe we’d both be dead.“_

_“…”_

_“Yeah, that’s right. Keep walking. One day that gun’s gonna misfire.”_

_“–!”_

_“You’re god damn ri– don’t– do not touch me, you crazy bitch– h…hha …  nn... ...how can you… hn... follow him, when… he’s just a fucking–when Big… Boss… You work for… him. At the end of it, you’re just another one of his attack dogs by proxy. Ah–“_

_“…”_

_“...you can all go to hell. You… and Big Boss, and fucking █████.”_

_“…”_

_“Don’t look at me like that. Of course I want–”_

_“Mm.”_

_“I know. I…”_

_“…”_

_“I don’t know why I try to talk to you.”_

[ — ]

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> FEATURED MISSIONS:
> 
> EPISODE 0: [ PROLOGUE: AWAKENING ]  
> EPISODE 11: [ CLOAKED IN SILENCE ]  
> Side Op 111. Visit Quiet  
> EPISODE 14: [ FOOTPRINTS OF PHANTOMS ]  
> EPISODE 43: [ SHINING LIGHTS, EVEN IN DEATH ]  
> Side Op 61. Unlucky Dog 01  
> Side Op 17. Extract The Highly Skilled Soldier 07  
> EPISODE 28: [ CODE TALKER ]  
> EPISODE 45: [ A QUIET EXIT ]  
> EPISODE 11: [ REUNION: CLOAKED IN SILENCE ]
> 
>  
> 
> FURTHER READING:
> 
> [KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual](http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB122/CIA%20Kubark%201-60.pdf)  
> [『 WETWORK 』](http://archiveofourown.org/series/654590)  
> [Nice Day For A White Wedding](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7878037)  
> [Bizarre Love Triangle](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5082343)  
> [The Enemy of My Enemy](http://archiveofourown.org/works/8777215)  
>    
> 


End file.
